Hyperion to Diotima
We’ve still found time to celebrate your feast day, lovely life! before the tumult begins. It was a heavenly day. Sweet springtime wafted and shone from the orient, it drew forth from us your name, just as it drew forth the blossoms from the trees, and all the blissful secrets of love poured out of me. A love like ours my friend had never known, and it was delightful how the proud man became all ear, how his eye and spirit glowed to grasp your image, your being.
‘Oh,’ he cried at last, ‘then it’s worth the effort fighting for our Greece if it still bears plants like these!’
‘That’s right, my Alabanda,’ I said; ‘then we'll go cheerful into battle, then heavenly fire will drive us on to deeds when our spirit is made young again by the image of such natures, and then we won’t be chasing after petty goals, then we won't be bothering with this and that, tinkering with externals and ignoring the spirit, drinking the wine for the cup’s sake; and we will not rest, Alabanda, till genial bliss is mystery no more, till all eyes are turned into triumphal arches from which the human spirit, so long absent, shines forth out of the erring and the suffering, and joyful in victory greets the paternal aether. — Ha! by the flag alone shall no one know our future people; all must be made new, there must be fundamental change; pleasure full of earnest and all labour full of cheer! nothing, not even the most paltry and commonplace, without the spirit and the gods! Love and hate and every sound from us must dumbfound the more vulgar world and never a single moment shall remind us of the humdrum past!’